My Home
by Teresa Castellon

New Orleans people relax on the front porches of their one-story, narrow shotgun houses, eat crawfish, and sing the blues with harmony and soul, like mockingbirds sitting on tree limbs, just happy to be alive.

On Bourbon Street, saxophonists play each little note with love, and cross dressers walk through the French Quarter in high heels, wearing thick metallic pink eye shadow and crooked meringue yellow wigs, and a Tarot card reader, in robes of black and red, with a white turban wrapped around her head, sits at her table covered in a tie dye tapestry, foretelling the future of hopeless lives.  On a humid summer night, smoke fills the air, and a black trumpet player, his mustache encasing his vibrant smile, shimmies his body, looking as if he had just won the lottery.

My home is streets full of restless people on Mardi Gras day, biggest party day in all of New Orleans; staying up until the sun rises. Walking through the French Quarter with the retched smell of urine and beer left over from last nights partying in the air.  Handing a dollar to the forgotten homeless man, wearing a hat that looks like it was picked at by a mouse with the large hole on the left side. His unshaven face and his rusty grocery cart filled with brown plastic bags, his most prized possessions enclosed in them, lying on the sidewalk where he has succumbed to the fate which he has placed upon himself, a forever wanderer of the streets, a common image in the life of a New Orleanian

In New Orleans, I can act any way I want. I could take an old couch with coffee stains and frayed edges, attach a motor and wheels to the bottom, and zoom throughout the streets, and still people wouldn’t think I’m crazy. Why? Everyone is a little crazy in New Orleans. I can act on my inspiration; I feel comfortable in my own skin. I am home.